Eddie Hitler-alike Paul Nuttall has gone on the offensive after people have questioned his claim to have been a survivor of the Hillsborough disaster. He claims to have been present at the disaster which killed 96 football fans, along with his father and two uncles.
The Hillsborough Families Support Group have asked the perfectly reasonable question why, if this was the case, he has never offered them his support. And others who were there, have said that they simply don’t remember him ever being there.
So what’s Eddie’s response? He has claimed he doesn’t like talking about it, and called anybody who questioned the fact that he was there ‘scum of the earth’.
Now it’s possible that he was there, but that the trauma of the event robbed others of the memory of his presence. Just as the many of the survivors of genuinely traumatic events don’t like talking about their experiences. But it seems much more likely that Nuttall is fibbing, to use highly unparliamentary language. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the Kippers have lied, and it probably won’t be the last. Their lying is now so pernicious that one gentleman from Stoke, interviewed by Chunky Mark on a video that was reblogged by Mike, described Nuttall’s office as ‘a lie shop’.
The silhouette fight on the end credits of Bottom. Don’t you wish this was Farage and Nuttall?
Mike over at Vox Political has posted this story about pranksters sabotaging an event by Paul ‘Eddie Hitler’ Nuttall in Stoke on Trent. UKIP advertised the event on-line, so that ‘lefties’ ordered plenty of reserve tickets without any intention of picking them up. Result: the hall was only half full.
Mike observes that he doesn’t condone the use of sabotage by members of political parties against their rivals. But he thinks that unused tickets that aren’t collected may be sold later. In which case, the half-empty audience may give a real picture of what the good people of Stoke on Trent think of Eddie Hitler and his storm-troopers.
Bottom’s Eddie Hitler and Paul Nuttall. The likeness is frightening.
Over the past week, Mike’s run some brilliant articles about the people of Stoke on Trent expressing their displeasure at Paul Nuttall’s attempt to be elected their MP. I’ve said before that Nuttall looks like Ade Edmondson’s character from the BBC comedy series, Bottom, the stupid, coarse and violent Eddie Hitler. Bottom, however, was intended to be deliberately funny, while there is nothing remotely comic about the racism, misogyny, homophobia and bigotry Nuttall and his party represent. Nuttall’s own attitude to the town and its people is derisory. He has never lived there, and cynically took up residence only a couple of days after he filed his candidacy. The contempt with which he treats them is reciprocated, and the good burghers are fighting back.
Yesterday Mike put up two photos showing just what local people think of Nuttall and the Kippers. One is of a notice in a house window, which states
‘Dear UKIP, Go away. I am neither racist, nor homophobic and you offend me.’
And the ladies of Women Against UKIP put up a mock Blue Plaque in Nuttall’s honour. This reads, ‘Paul Nuttall, leader of UKIP 2016- Did not live here’.
Today Mike’s put up another piece showing a video from Chunky Mark, the artist taxi driver, in which he talks to three people from Stoke on Trent, who give their views on Nuttall and his office in the town. It’s a man and two women. The man makes the acute observation that Nuttall’s office used to be a pie shop, ‘Now it’s a lie shop.’ He states that Nuttall’s party is about causing division, not about helping the people of Stoke on Trent. Nuttall and his party wish to privatise the NHS and schools, abolish maternity and other welfare benefits, on which plenty of people in Stoke rely. And now after making it clear that he wants to privatise the NHS, he now claims to want to save the NHS.
The two women share the man’s views on Nuttall. They also makes the point that he doesn’t really want to work for the people of Stoke on Trent, and is just spreading hatred and racism. One of the women reminds the viewers that Nuttall did say he wanted to privatise the NHS, because we have an aging population. She emphasises this, to show Nuttalls contempt for this most precious of British institutions and Britain’s seniors. She also objects to Nuttall claiming that immigrants are coming to take our benefits. She finds this hurtful to the people of her town, and to the immigrants, who come here and work hard and do not take benefits. And now Nuttall’s pasted his lies up. She states that she is ashamed of the shop, and afraid that his lies will infect the local people. As for Nuttall demanding a ‘quick Brexit’, she states that Britain has voted for Brexit, and it’s going to happen. But we need the best deal, and a quick Brexit is not the answer.
All of this is exactly true. I think the NHS Action Party has a video up showing Nuttall saying quite clearly that he wants to privatise the NHS. And his statement that immigrants are coming here to steal our benefits is another lie. Mike and the other bloggers have posted up the stats plenty of times showing that immigrants to Britain are net contributors to the welfare state. But it’s convenient propaganda to work people up against foreigners, along with the lie that they’re stealing our jobs.
What comes across from this video and the other pics Mike’s put up is that the people of Stoke are ordinary and decent, and extremely and rightly worried that Nuttall and his stormtroopers will whip up racial tension and hatred. Their anti-welfare policies will cause more poverty. The Kippers are doing this purely for their own national political ambitions, without any regard for the local people their divisive policies will hurt. And I’ve no doubt that this could be applied to other towns up and down the country where the Kippers are standing.
After the Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, here’s another Arturo Ui figure in this country, whose racial populism should be opposed. Paul Nuttall, who looks to me like Ade Edmondson as the stupid, vulgar and violent hooligan Eddie Hitler in his and Rik Mayall’s comedy series, Bottom, has just become head of UKIP. And Hope Not Hate have today put up ten good reasons why decent people should oppose him and his party. Here’s their list of 10 reasons, with a few of my comments underneath.
1. He has strongly supported Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ billboard. That was the party’s advert that showed a line long of immigrants supposedly queuing up to get into Europe. It aroused strong criticism because it was almost identical to a Nazi poster, showing the lines of eastern European Jews, who they accused of threatening to overrun western civilisation.
2. He believes there is a secret coordinated Muslim plot to become a majority in Europe.
The Islamophobic right has been claiming that this is the case for years, despite demographic evidence to the contrary. It’s called ‘Eurabia’, and is based on the belief that Muslim birthrates are so far ahead of White European population growth that within one or two generations we’ll be a minority in our own countries. It’s a nasty, vicious lie, and one that has been exploited by the hatemongers in the Fascist right. There’s a propaganda movie on YouTube that shows pictures of street fighting and a Europe in flames, which claims that this is what will happen to Europe by the ’20s, when there will be a civil war between Muslims and their Leftist allies on one side, and ‘patriots’ – read: Nazis, on the other. There was a scandal in Wiltshire about a year or so ago, when one of the Kippers in that county made a speech, or series of speeches, claiming that this would happen. This was rightly greeted with so much outrage that the politico had to resign.
3. In a speech in the European Parliament, Nuttall labelled the response of the EU to the refugee crisis as “freedom of movement of Jihad”.
Which is the same argument Trump uses to support his ban on Muslim immigration: some of them might be terrorists. Despite the fact that, as they’re refugees, jihad is the reason they’re fleeing the Middle East.
4. He wants to ban the burqa.
One of the reasons this needs to be resisted is that it gives the state the power to dictate religious observances, which should be a matter of individual choice, contravening the human right to freedom of religion. And if it can be done to Muslims, it can be extended to other religious or philosophical groups.
5. Nuttall has called for the NHS to be privatised.
To support this, the article in Hope Not Hate has a link to this video below, by the National Health Action party, where Nuttall calls it a ‘monolithic hangover from days gone by’. This alone is an excellent reason for shunning Nuttall and his wretched party.
6. He wants a 31% flat rate of tax, meaning the rich pay far less.
7. He wants prison conditions to be made deliberately worse and the 1967 Criminal Justice Act to be abolished.
Despite the constant refrains of the likes of the Heil and Express, prisons are grim places. The Mirror this morning carried a report on the rising number of suicides in British prisons, which are far more than those outside. And Private Eye has regularly carried news stories in its ‘In The Back’ column about young offenders committing suicide, or being beaten to death by the other inmates, sometimes in adult jails. Does Nuttall really more useless and avoidable deaths in prison? It’s also unsurprising that he also wants the return of the death penalty, which Hope Not Hate points out would mean that Britain would share the same attitude towards crime as Belarus, a military dictatorship.
8. Nuttall believes climate change is a “hair-brained theory”.
It’s also not going to surprise anyone that he’s also another supporter of fracking.
9. Was one of only 14 MEPs to vote against a crackdown on the illegal ivory trade.
People have been concerned about the devastation of elephant populations in Africa, thanks to the illegal ivory trade since at least the 1990s. A few years ago I think one of the royals even suggested that objects made from ivory before the international ban date should be junked as a deterrent to the poachers by making ivory absolutely unsaleable. Clearly, this view is not shared by Nuttall, who obviously is no fan of conservation and protecting the environment.
10. Opposes same-sex marriage.
This seems to be the bog-standard, default position of the majority of Kippers. Or at least, those who open their mouths.
All of this just shows that, not only is Nuttall deeply bigoted, and his party opposed to many of the institutions, not least the NHS, which have made Britain a healthy, tolerant society, but it also bears out what Tom Pride and many other bloggers have also shown: that the Kippers aren’t offering anything new, or different, but are the extreme right of the Tory party.
Friday’s Independent carried news of research by Imperial College London that that the private and voluntary healthcare organisations that have bought into the NHS perform worse than the traditional GP system. New Labour in 2004 opened up the NHS to private healthcare firms like Virgin Healthcare and Care UK, and also social enterprises and voluntary organisations. At the moment, these organisations provide 347 GP surgeries out of the total 8,300 in England. The Indie noted that these firms typically served more deprived, younger and diverse populations than normal, state-run surgeries.
The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, found that these private, voluntary and social organisations provided worse service than the state in 15 out of 17 key areas. These included patient satisfaction, diabetes control and keeping patients out of hospital.
Supporters of these private GP services criticised the study’s findings on the grounds that like was not compared with like.
This is, nevertheless, a blow to the supporters of the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS under the Tories and Lib Dems. There are 92 MPs in the coalition parties, who either own, or have senior positions in the private healthcare firms seeking to profit from the NHS, including the minister for chequebook genocide, Iain Duncan Smith. Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt have both spoken out in favour of the privatisation of the NHS. One Tory politico even stated that it wouldn’t exist if the Tories won a second term. When this was reported, Tory Central Office immediately went into emergency spin mode, and claimed he’d been misreported. They said instead that what he meant was that the NHS would be transformed by the removal of all the bureaucracy.
And the Kippers have been very outspoken in their desire to privatise the NHS. The Purple Duce, Nigel Farage, claims he doesn’t want to privatise it, but has said that he wants state funding to be replace by private insurance. Which means privatisation. His deputy, Paul Nuttall, has stated very clearly that he wants it privatised. I can’t remember if it was Nuttall, or one of the other Kippers, who went off and compared the NHS to Nazi Germany. This says much about the extreme Right-wing hysteria running through UKIP. They really believe that any kind of state intervention = Nazism. Because the Nazis put ‘Socialist’ in their name.
As for the Tories’ claim that their people don’t advocate the privatisation of the NHS: they’re lying. The bureaucracy has actually increased in the NHS due to the introduction of privatisation, PFI and the internal market, the basis of which was introduced by Peter ‘I’ve got a little list’ Lilley’ in the 1990s under John Major.
As for not keeping people out of hospital, from the point of view of private medicine this is just good, profit-making sense. Private hospitals make their money from treating people. Therefore, they have a vested interest in making sure as many people are sent to them as possible. It’s why the private healthcare system of the US is riddled with cases where people have undergone unnecessary surgery.
Earlier today I reblogged a video that has been sent out by 38 Degrees, asking people to use their vote to defend and protect the NHS. I notice that a number of my readers here have already reblogged in their turn. Thanks! We’ve got to do all we can to stop the privatisation of the NHS.
And that means definitely not voting for the Tories, the Lib Dems and very definitely not the Kippers.
According to today’s Gloucestershire Echo, the party’s leaflets for their campaign in Cheltenham were printed by a Bavarian company, Onlineprinters, at Neustadt an der Aisch. Which kinda makes a mockery to the party’s slogan of ‘Believe in Britain’.
UKIP’s spokeswoman, a Mrs Simmonds, said that it was a simple business deal, as the Gloucestershire printers couldn’t provide the same quality and price.
So much for UKIP’s patriotism, but it does show you their real values. They have absolutely no interest in protecting the country economically. Indeed, they seem to stand four-square behind the Tories’ privatisation of Britain’s assets, which have been sold to companies outside the UK.
What they are really against are mass immigration, and, of course, Britain’s own working class. Hence the demands to remove workers’ rights like maternity leave, sickness pay, paid holiday.
As for criticising the Tories for their ‘broken promises’, this is mendacious coming from the Kippers. They promise to provide another £3 billion in funding for the NHS. As Nigel Farage wants to replace it with an insurance based system, and Paul Nuttall and other senior Kippers have said they want to privatise it, the reality is that probably the NHS won’t see any money from them at all. Except in so far as a temporary boost in investment may make it attractive to the highest bidders.
This is another video from the alternative, left-wing or progressive American news media. This time it’s David Pakman, who’s interviewing Wendell Potter. Potter is a former VP of Corporate Communications at Cigna, and the author of the books Deadly Spin and Obamacare: What’s In It for Me.
In his books and other writings, Potter examined the reality behind the comments and the negative depiction of Britain’s NHS in America to show the truth: Britain’s health service is excellent, and far and away much better than that of America.
He states that the stories of long waiting times and poor care trotted out by advocates of private healthcare are anecdotal. He also spoke to Brits living in America, and Americans with dual citizenship with Britain, who had experience of both British and American healthcare. He states that they all stated that British health care was better. It was much cheaper, for a start.
American healthcare is much more expensive than those in the other countries. Thirty per cent of American costs are wasted in bureaucracy.
It is also not true that the tax burden in Britain and other countries with similar systems is higher than America. Americans are also paying significantly for the healthcare in taxes at a comparable level, but this is hidden.
He notes that in the statistics compiled of 11 countries in the developed world by international authorities, Britain’s NHS is no.1, while America is right at the bottom at 11.
British health outcomes are better, as indeed are those in the other countries, which have state regulated or single payer healthcare. The infant mortality rates in America is much higher, for example.
Mr Potter also points out that because healthcare is immensely profitable, the insurance companies and medical industries are actively promoting their system as the best, which he attempted to expose in his book, Deadly Spin.
Pakman and Potter also discuss the fact that American healthcare 100 years ago was moving towards something like state healthcare. However, as this became massively unpopular and there was a campaign against because it was the system used by the Germans, who were the first country to have a state healthcare system.
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDikbhDmavo
This is an important corrective to some of the lies told about the NHS by the Republicans in America and the Tories and Kipper over here. The Conservatives and their Lib Dem enablers are actively privatising the health service. 92 Tory and Lib Dem MPs have connections to private healthcare companies seeking to profit from its dismantlement. A few years ago Boris Johnson even wrote a piece in the Spectator demanding that Britain’s NHS be abolished in favour of the American model. Nigel Farage and his chief gauleiter, Paul Nuttall, have both advocated its privatisation, as have other Kippers.
This must not be allowed. andtThis video shows the reality behind the Right-wing propaganda.
Earlier this week I put up a post about reports in the Belfast Telegraph and ITV that 2000 AD was planning to skewer Farage in a forthcoming Judge Dredd strip. This will pit the hardest lawman in Mega-City One against the corrupt, racist politico, Bilious Barrage.
Now it seems that the Independent also is publishing their comic strip attack on the Purple Duce. I found this piece posted on the SlatUKIP site, reporting a piece in the Independent about the launch of the Metamorphosis comic strip, by one of their cartoonists. The strip seems to take Kafka’s novel, Metamorphosis, and puts an extra spin on it to turn it into a modern parable about racism.
Kafka’s novel is about a man, who wakes up one day to find that he has been transformed over night into a beetle. In this strip, giant intelligent cockroaches have appeared, and are being victimised in same way as foreign immigrants are in contemporary Britain. There is even an anti-cockroach party, UCOC, led by a politician, who looks exactly like Farage. Here’s the link.
Apart from Kafka, the strip also seems influenced by Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This was an alternative comic narrating the experiences of Spiegelman’s father and the situation of the Jews in the Third Reich as an animal fable. The Jews were mice, the Germans cats, and the Poles were pigs. The Independent’sMetamorphosis seems to be following Spiegelman in using comics to combat racism, and animals as metaphors for the different racial groups.
A little while ago I posted a piece lamenting the absence of underground and alternative comics tackling the great issues of modern Britain. Now it seems they’re coming back. And that can only be a good thing, so here’s to more of them, and more power to their artists’ satirical elbows.
Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Disability
While this comic book uses Kafka’s idea of transformation into an insect as a metaphor for racism, the original novel can be read as a parable about disability. Though Kafka himself spoke and wrote in German, the novel’s title in Czech is Zuk, which literally means ‘beetle’, but can also mean anything loathsome or disgusting. Kafka was a clerk working in the insurance department, and his novels of labyrinthine bureaucracy are basically fantastic extrapolations from the real bureaucracy in which he worked.
In Metamorphosis, the hero’s transformation renders him unable to work, and he eventually either dies or commits suicide, because he is an increasing drain on his family. This could be seen as a metaphor for the all-too real predicament the disabled and their families ended up in 19th century Bohemia, when accident or disease rendered them unable to make a living.
Which is basically another good reason for why no-one should ever vote UKIP. Farage, Nuttall and the rest of stormtroopers would like to see the welfare state completely removed and the NHS privatised. Various Kipper politicos have made monstrous comments about the disabled, and denied the right of disabled children to be born.
This morning I reblogged another great piece from Tom Pride on the Nazi ideas of the Kippers’ European ally, Janusz Korwin-Mikke. This particularly Nazi has stated that the disabled should not be on television, which should be reserved for the strong, healthy and able-bodied. He also announced that supporting the disabled hadn’t yet spread to Africa, which was why they were going to become so much stronger than Europeans. In his view, this will lead to them invading and massacring us.
It’s bog-standard, 19th century eugenics crap, and could almost have come straight from Hitler himself, or any of the biology textbooks published in the Third Reich. It’s particularly ironic coming from a Pole, as the Nazis viewed all the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe – Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Russians, Czechs and Slovaks, among many others, as sub-humans. They were to be enslaved and worked to death after the Nazis conquered their countries. As well as the extermination of the Jews and Gypsies, the Nazis were also responsible for horrific atrocities against these peoples, including in Poland.
Farage made an alliance with Korwin-Mikke’s party to get EU money by forming a voting bloc of extreme Right-wing and anti-EU parties within the European parliament. It shows a cynical absence of any kind of morality, and the underlying Fascism behind Farage’s democratic façade.
Mike over Vox Political has written this piece, Backroom deal between Tories and UKIP could kill the NHS on the possibility that Cameron’s lacklustre performance at the Leaders’ Debates may indicate that he is already set on supporting his government by forming a coalition with the Kippers. Many of the Kipper candidates are ex-Tories, and there is a fluidity of movement between the two parties.
And together, they are a real threat to the NHS. Cameron and his cronies are privatising it by the backdoor, and a series of Kippers, from the Purple Duce himself, Nigel Farage, his deputy, Paul Nuttall, and many others, have stated very clearly that they want the NHS scrapped and replaced with private medicine, funded by private insurance, as in America. This prospect has alarmed Labour’s Andy Burnham, that he has written to the PM outlining his fears.
Mike’s article begins
Considering the facts of the Coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats*, perhaps we should be asking if a deal has already been struck between the Conservative Party and UKIP.
It would explain why David Cameron’s performance in yesterday’s leader debate was so lacklustre – maybe he doesn’t think he needs to sell himself.
A deal with UKIP makes perfect sense to those of us who have watched politics carefully over the last few years – the ease with which Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless transferred from one party to the other, keeping their Parliamentary seats in the process, shows how interchangeable the two parties really are.
Labour’s Andy Burnham has written to Cameron, calling on him to “come clean” about any such plans.
He wrote: “During last night’s debate you proved that you cannot defend your record, which is why you cannot win a majority. It is now clear that you are preparing to do a deal with UKIP.
“As someone who follows rather than leads their party, you will know that a deal with UKIP is what the Tory Party wants. A growing number of your MPs and up to half of Conservative activists are arguing for it. Local Tory parties are already striking deals with UKIP up and down the country and, of course, two of your MPs have already crossed the floor.
“We know the terms of such a deal. Nigel Farage has said he would work with you in exchange for ‘a full and fair referendum to be held in 2015′. You have said you would be ‘delighted’ to offer this.
“But the real terms of a deal would see the end of the NHS as we know it.
According to EDL News, Oberleutnantsturmgangkipperfuhrer Paul Nuttall told hecklers at a meeting in Porthmadog that they should speak English at UKIP meetings. The two hecklers, including language campaigner Dr Simon Brooks, were angry that there were no translation facilities, literature in Welsh or opportunities to ask questions in Welsh at the meeting. Brooks stated that as most people in the town spoke Welsh, it was a disgrace not to have information and material available in Welsh.
Nuttall replied that most people in Wales spoke English. ‘If people want to come here, they should speak English’.
There are certainly parts of the principality where they speak English, and in which the people themselves see no need to provide material in Welsh. However, there are also areas which are extremely proud of their language and do make the point of speaking it. And usually at meetings like this, even if one is not able to speak the local language, an attempt to say a few words goes a long way.
For example, yesterday’s edition of Bargain Hunt, the popular BBC antiques programme, also came from the Land of Comrades, and the contestants were Welsh-speaking. So the host got them to teach her the phrase for ‘Welcome to Wales’. And there were odd moments when the contestants spoke Welsh to some of the traders in an attempt to get the price down. It was all good natured, and added a piece of local variety to the programme.
Nuttall’s comments, and the lack of any gesture in the direction of providing Welsh-speaking material in a Welsh-speaking area will be seen as yet more evidence of Mr Jonathan Stanley complained about the Scots party: that it used the language of English nationalism.
And in Wales, as in Scotland, that’s guaranteed to lose votes.
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